Goalie Braden Holtby is scheduled to start in goal Thursday night when the Hershey Bears play the Norfolk Admirals at Verizon Center, Hershey Bears head coach Mark French said Wednesday.

Mattias Sjogren
HERSHEY BEARS

The starting assignments for Friday, when the Bears visit Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, and Saturday, when Hamilton visits Giant Center, are TBA.

The Bears had a cracking good practice before departing for Washington. Line tweaks have been made, most notably Jeff Taffe moving from second-line center to first-line left wing.

"We want to reshuffle the deck a little bit," French said. "Being on the road two games, we want to create maybe a little bit more balance on our four lines, not being able to control last change and matchups and things like that.

“Jeff Taffe has played a lot of wing. Coming into the year, we probably thought he was going to play more on the left side, so it will give him an easy transition to move there.”

It looks like Mattias Sjogren, a healthy scratch in four of the last five games, will return to the lineup Thursday.

"I want to see a level of urgency," French said. "I don't think at the start of the year we envisioned healthy scratching him. He's had trouble coming off an injury early. I'd like to see more passion to his game, a little bit more urgency and a little bit more jump.”